BASE jump through a floating city, creating your own stunts to delight your fans. You dive off a skyscraper, relying on quick reflexes to negotiate the intricate tangle of girders that make up the floating city. All eyes are on you as the judges mark your score. One hundred points for hugging those exposed struts as you fall.
Well, at least this isn't a prototype. And now I know where tiny bits of the gameplay for Kick It came from.
AaAaAA is a 2009 game from Dejobaan Games that essentially boils down to maneuvering your way through a floating city as you plummet through 81 various levels. The gameplay starts very basic - 10 points for "hugs", remaining close to a building and 100 points for "kisses", getting close to a new building. As you progress through the game's menu (below), you unlock various other abilities such as the Gesture glove so you can thumbs-up your fans and flip off your detractors or the spray paint can for defacing particular buildings. By getting a high enough score on each level, you earn "teeth" which in turn allow you to unlock more levels, videos and items.
My first complaint about the game is decidedly subjective, and that is the overall tone and presentation of the game. From the strange terminology (never quite figured out why teeth was the currency of the game) to entirely nonsensical videos, the whole game smacked of trying just a little hard to be quirky and "indie". Perhaps it just hasn't aged especially well, but I found myself constantly annoyed at the random voice-overs blithely wasting time in the menu or other random weirdness. Being nonsensical is not the same as being hilarious.
This style has consequences for usability as well. If you look at that level selection screen above and think "wow, how clean and intuitive", then you and I are very different people. It's messy, confusing, and unnecessary. It becomes especially obnoxious when you find yourself scrambling for teeth toward the end of the game to unlock the last few levels. Well, you think, the best way to get more teeth is to improve my score on a level I didn't do particularly well on! Too bad, says the game, you need to scroll over every one of these cubes to figure out which ones you only 2-starred. When it comes to menus, function always trumps form. I would take something that looked like an Excel sheet if it was sortable, showed the difficulty, and didn't display hints as though they were levels.
All of that aside, the gameplay itself is quite good. There's a tension, a clenching that occurs with each jump as you balance the risk of smashing yourself into a thousand broken bits against the reward of sweet, sweet kisses. The landing is probably the most frustrating part of this experience, though. As you get to the bottom, there are often several different rings which award significant bonus points if you land within them. It's almost impossible to get a good score without landing in at least the lower-scoring ring. This makes the landing maneuvers a whole body experience, at least for me. I found myself standing and leaning wildly to one side (like you unconsciously do in racing games) in the hopes that I would swing just one . . . more . . . inch . . . Let's put it this way: I'm glad I played this game without anyone else in the room.
There's also enough variety on the level design that what seems like an overall simple mechanic can take on many different flavors throughout the course of the game. One level might have you hugging close to a mountain and trying to skim across score plates, and the next has you slaloming around skyscrapers and flipping the bird to a couple hundred spectators. It gives each level a kind of distinctness (especially as you replay them for higher scores) that the obnoxious names have nothing to do with.
At first I was annoyed by the teeth mechanic as I do not generally take kindly to being forced to replay old levels. However, there's a real dopamine rush in going back to a level you only even got 2 stars on after twenty minutes of crashing into crap and suddenly realizing you're way better at the game than you were just a few hours earlier. It's viscerally satisfying to be coming in for a landing just knowing that you nailed that 5-stars (and heartbreaking when you miss it by a few hundred points).
Overall, I can generally recommend this game, though probably not for full price. If it's in a solid bundle though, give it a whirl! There's also apparently a sequel that incorporates these levels as well as introduces quite a few new ones.
(A quick note, I did unlock and complete all of the levels but I didn't five-star all of them. I felt that this was still completing the game, even if it was not 100%-ing the game.)
Score: 3.5/5
Steam Store Link
Current Price: $9.99
Next game: Amnesia: The Dark Descent. I'm working on another post that touches on why I'm so apprehensive about this one.
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